The fine grain ability to customize and breathe soul into your WordPress website is one of the greatest advantages that the WordPress platform affords you. The heart of that customizability lies in the humble plugin. WordPress plugins give you the power to instill your site with feature rich interactivity, but require little more effort on your part than a child might spend adding another lego to their creation.
The WordPress Repository, home to all official WordPress plugins, represents thousands of hours spent by developers all over the world. With WordPress, it’s all at your fingertips. In the next few minutes we’ll look at how you can harness that power for yourself and begin breathing life into your website.
About Plugins and the WordPress Repository
The WordPress core is designed to be lightweight, flexible, and extensible. It has been designed with your desire to customize in mind and to allow you to take that desire as far as possible. Only two plugins come stock with WordPress, Hello Dolly and Akismet. Hello Dolly is the first ever WordPress plugin, an Easter egg of sorts that displays lines from the Louis Armstrong song of the same name. Akismet is a comment spam filter.
The WordPress Repository is the official reservoir of plugins. Every plugin in the repo has been designed following detailed guidelines and has gone through a series of initial tests to ensure that it is malware free. The repo is monitored and moderated to ensure continued compliance to the guidelines, but as always when acquiring any software from the internet use common sense and good judgment. Bad eggs exist.
How to Install a WordPress Plugin
You have three options for getting a plugin installed, but option one is probably all you need as a beginner. Option two is for those who have found a plugin that you just have to have but isn’t in the repo, and option three is really only for more technical niche uses. They are all worth being aware of for future reference, however.
A final note before we begin: If your site is on wordpress.com, the following steps will not work for you as plugins cannot be installed to wordpress.com accounts. To install plugins for WordPress you must be using the WordPress software available at wordpress.org. If you are interested in exploring the differences between the two, we have a detailed write-up already available for you!
Option 1 – Auto Install From Dashboard
This is the easiest option. It will work for any plugin provided that it can be found in the WordPress repository.
- Head over to Plugins in the Dashboard and give it a click.
- Click ‘Add New’. You now have access to the entire repository through your WordPress dashboard!
- Enter the name of the plugin you want to install (or descriptive keywords like calendar) in the search field and then select the plugin you want from the list that appears.
- Click ‘Install Now’ on that plugin’s tab.
- An installation window will now appear. If any errors occurred it will let you know here. Otherwise, click ‘Activate’ to activate your plugin. Some plugins will prompt you to do some plugin specific setup after this, but you have now installed a WordPress plugin! Congratulations!
Option 2 – Manual Install from Dashboard
If you want a specific plugin that isn’t present in the repository, you’ll need to do a manual install. Technically you could also use this option to install a plugin you have manually downloaded from the repo if you were so inclined. I’ll assume basic familiarity with plugin installation for this option.
- Download the plugin zip file to your computer from the internet. Leave it zipped up!
- Head to Plugins in your WordPress dashboard and click ‘Add New’.
- Instead of searching the repository for your plugin, Click ‘Upload Plugin’.
- On the window that opens, click ‘Browse’ to retrieve your plugin from the location you saved it on your computer, and then click ‘Install Now’.
- An installation window will now appear. If any errors occurred it will let you know here. Otherwise, click ‘Activate’ to activate your plugin.
Option 3 – Manual Install via FTP
You may find that at some point you have the need to install a plugin directly into WordPress via File Transfer Protocol (FTP). It isn’t difficult to learn, so if you do run into a scenario where you need to do this, don’t be afraid to try. You will need a FTP client such as FileZilla (Windows or Mac) or Cyberduck (Mac). I will assume a basic familiarity with using a FTP client for these steps.
- Extract the downloaded plugin file.
- Connect to your website via your FTP client.
- Navigate your site’s WordPress installation using the FTP client and find the ‘plugins’ folder (wp-content>plugins).
- Upload the unzipped plugin folder itself to the plugins folder. Take care that if the unzip software placed the plugin folder itself within another folder that it created, you do not upload the extra folder. Your directory path should be, for example, wp-content/plugins/ninjaforms, not wp-content/plugins/ninjaforms/ninjaforms
- Return to Plugins in your WordPress dashboard and the new plugin should be present. Activate the plugin normally and you’re good to go.
You now have the knowledge you need to turn your WordPress website into whatever you want it to become! With over 40,000 plugins in the repository, you have a daunting yet exciting time in front of you. Be sure to look at the Showcase section of wordpress.org, where many other WordPress websites are on display. It’s a great way to collect ideas for what you can do with your site. Don’t miss the many great themes available to you as well. Have fun, be creative, and the best of luck designing your masterpiece!
lucy4g says
Thanks, Quay Morgan. Now it seems easy to me.
Quay Morgan says
Glad it helped!